Max sat on the floor of the empty living room and opened her laptop. She sent a message to her friend, Techno Queen Portia, to ask if anything had come back on the e-mail Adam had received. Done, Max checked her mail. Seeing nothing needing her immediate attention, she signed off and closed the laptop.
Downstairs in his lab, Adam sighed with frustration. The solution to his problem continued to elude him. He’d tried everything he could think of to get the prototype to produce heat for longer periods. He’d altered the bath components, fiddled with the metal housing’s chemical composition, and even heated the inner works artificially, but the results were always the same. Nothing. He checked his watch. A couple of hours had passed since dinner. He stretched his tired arms and shoulders and decided to take a break. Maybe a banana split might help. The thought brought on a smile. In reality, taking her up on the offer was nothing more than an opportunity for him to spend time with her, but he had no shame, he’d take what he could get.
Out on the patio, Max set her book aside and looked at her watch. Seven-thirty. The sun had lost most of its heat and the air had cooled, but because of the state’s northerly position there was at least another hour or so of daylight. She hadn’t seen Adam, and admitted to herself that she was disappointed that the good doctor hadn’t come up out of his hole and taken advantage of her dessert offer, because she wanted to spend more time with him. On the other hand, she knew she had no business wanting his company. After all, she was here to do a job. But hey, a girl could dream.
She heard the patio door opening. To her delight, Adam stepped out. “Hey,” she said softly. “How’s tricks?”
He shook his head. “Still giving me fits. I decided to take a break. Is it too late for that banana split?”
“Nope.” She got up, and as she did heard the dogs barking out front. The angry timbre of the sounds made her grab up her BlackBerry and start punching in codes. The dogs had small cameras and a bunch of other electronic gadgets in their collars. She impatiently waited the few seconds while the picture downloaded, and then stared. “Oh, shit!”
“What’s wrong?”
Max ran. “The dogs have some guy treed. Get inside! Lock the door!”
Adam didn’t, of course. He took off right behind her.
Max tore through the house and out to the Honda. She threw open the hatch, snatched out the wheel well cover, and pulled out her Glock. She primed it, her face grim. Noticing Adam behind her, she said, “Didn’t I tell you to stay inside?”
“Yeah, but—”
“But nothing!” she snapped. “When I tell you something, you damn well better do it!”
“Hey!” he said, offended.
“I’m supposed to be protecting you, remember? I can’t do that if you don’t cooperate. Now, come on! I’ll deal with you later.”
Adam followed, not sure whether to laugh or be mad.
Sure enough, Ruby and Ossie had a man up a tree. He was hanging from a large branch that put him just out of reach of the snarling dogs. They were growling, jumping and trying to grab hold so they could bring him down. He was screaming.
When Max walked up, she saw a handgun on the ground that he must have dropped. The dogs stopped their jumping at the sight of her but continued to circle beneath their prey and growl menacingly.
The thin man finally noticed Max and Adam and he gushed in an Eastern European accent, “Oh thank the saints. Are these animals yours?”
“Who are you?” Max asked.
“Sergei Robinski. Please call the dogs.”
“Do you know this is private property?”
A mad Ruby jumped again. Robinski screeched and hastily pulled his legs up out of the way just in time to avoid her sharp teeth. With one eye on the dogs and the other on Max’s Glock, he answered, “No. I mean yes, but I’m just a poor salesman looking for new customer for my cousin’s business.”
Max picked up the gun. “Which is?”
“Computer repair.”
“You always carry a gun when you make sales calls, Mr. Robinski?”
“This is a dangerous country, sometimes. Please, take the dogs away so that I may come down,” he pleaded.
Max could see him eyeing Adam. “Sorry. Can’t do that. You’re going to have to stay up there until the police come.”
“The police?”
“Yep. You’re trespassing.” Max didn’t believe a word of his story. Ignoring him for the moment, she told the dogs, “Good job, you two.”
Max pulled out her phone and placed a call. When she was done, she snapped the phone closed and stuck it back on her belt. “Police will be here shortly. Nice meeting you, Mr. Robinski.”
She then looked at the tight-faced Adam. “Let’s go.”
Robinski called out, “Wait!”
Max tossed back. “You can tell your story to the police.”
“Please!”
“The dogs will keep you company.”
On the way back to the house she asked Adam, “How many people around here know who you are and what you do?”
“Around here? I’m not sure.”
“Do people in the scientific community know you work here?”
“Some do. Why?”
“Because if whomever sent Robinski wasn’t sure you lived here, they’re real sure now after seeing your face.” She looked his way and said seriously, “Next time, do as I ask.”
Adam stopped, but she kept walking. He watched her stride off, feeling like a kid who’d just been to the principal’s office. She was right, of course, but he was male, and taking orders from a female in a potentially dangerous situation was hard to do. Society raised men to stand and fight, not to hide behind locked doors. This was not going to be easy, he realized, and she was really really mad.
Yes, she was. Pacing in the living room, Max wondered why she had to fight this battle every time she was assigned to a man. Invariably she had to yell at them for not taking her seriously. Usually after she pointed out that if they could protect themselves she wouldn’t have been hired, they got it, but it was still maddening. She was the one with the training, she was the one with the gun, not them. It came to her then that she should calm down. What’s done was done. Her call hadn’t been to the police but to the FBI. If Robinski was something besides a computer salesman—and she was sure he was—the agents from the Bureau would sort it out. Once they made their report, she’d know more about what she might be potentially facing and plan accordingly so she could keep Dr. Dummy out of harm’s way.
In response to Max’s call, the Bureau agents—two women—arrived within the hour and took the very angry Sergei Robinski into custody. The dogs had terrified him so much that he’d soiled himself trying to get away from them. The agents had to drape a tarp over the backseat of their car before they allowed him to get in. Max had located a car down by the gate that she assumed to be his. The agents made a call to have it towed to their office so they could comb through it.
Watching them drive away, Max said to Adam, “They’ll find out who he really is.” She turned his way and said sincerely, “You have to follow my directions.”
“I know, and my apologies. Hard for a man to take orders.”
“Believe me, you’re not the first man to tell me that.”
“Men give you a hard time.”
“Always.”
Their eyes held and their mutual attraction rose and singed away the tension like sunlight burning off the fog. Max looked away first. “Um, I want to check out the video from the dogs’ collars. I’ll get my laptop.”
A few minutes later Max and Adam were at the patio table, using the laptop to watch a replay of the video from Ossie’s camera. She was seated and Adam was standing close, leaning over the screen. The dogs were lying on the patio, chilling.
The picture that came up was a bit jumpy. Max assumed it was because the dogs had been running after the screaming Robinski. She said, “I’ll have to let Portia know that the camera’s stabilizer still needs a tweak.”
>
“That’s awesome clarity.”
Max could feel the warmth of his body bathing her gently. “Yeah, girlfriend is the diva. Her little toys are getting better and better.”
“She built the camera?”
Max smiled, watching Robinski on the monitor hauling ass up the tree. “Yep, she has all types of goodies in her pipeline, not to mention the dog breeding she’s into.” Max studied the dogs’ vertical leaps. “Look at the way Ruby is springing off that other tree in order to get a better angle. She is so smart.”
The sight and sounds of the angry dogs chasing down and then treeing Robinski forced Adam to take in a deep breath. That was how he’d been run down, and all of a sudden his head was filled with the sounds and the pain and his own screams. He was twelve again, rolling and screaming and trying to escape the big teeth that were tearing open his face, and his hands were bloody—
“Adam!”
Max called again, “Adam!” He was ashen, gray. Gone. Somewhere.
He seemed to shake himself free and his eyes met hers. In the background she could hear Ossie and Ruby snarling and barking on the video and she knew. “Oh lord. I’m sorry.” She quickly muted the volume then closed the program. Stricken, she searched his grimly set face. “I’m so sorry.”
“Damn,” he whispered. “I’m shaking.” He held out his hand and the palsy was evident. “Haven’t had one of those in years.”
The therapist Adam had seen after the attack called the frightening episodes waking nightmares. They’d occurred more frequently back then and would take him over at a moment’s notice. Those, coupled with the real nightmares that terrorized him at night, left him too scared to sleep and too scared to be awake for months. Now, like most men, he was angry at and embarrassed by his weakness before a woman. He could only imagine what she must be thinking. “I have to go,” he said.
Max wanted to smack herself for being so unfeeling, even though that hadn’t been her intent. Watching him walk to the door, she longed to call him back and say she was sorry, again, and that it was okay if he had issues with the dogs, but she’d spent most of her adult life working with men. She knew how prideful they could be. Anything she said might be construed as pity, so she remained silent and watched him disappear inside the house.
The dogs were lying a few feet away, and they watched his exit, too. When Adam closed the door behind him, Ossie lifted his head and let out a series of mournful barks. Max walked over and knelt beside him. She stroked his neck and said softly, “I know, babe. I know. But he’s going to have to work this through on his own.”
Adam didn’t go to the lab. Instead he found himself upstairs in his room, staring at his reflection in the mirror. What would people think if they knew that the man Time magazine called “one of the brightest minds of the future” could be turned into a quivering mass of protoplasm by a couple of canines? Granted, he had good reason. The attack on him had been no joke, and left him physically scarred for life. But he was a grown man now and he needed to come to grips with the experience so he could shake free of the demons that remained hidden in his psyche. But how, was the question.
He turned away from the mirror and walked over to the windows. He could see her down on the beach walking with the dogs. He wondered what she’d thought of him and his fit. No man wanted to let a woman see him under such circumstances, mainly because it elicited pity, and that was the last thing he wanted from the tall beauty outside. Had she not called his name, there was no telling how far he might have sunk into that memory. He was glad she had, though, and wondered if she’d ever call him by his given name again. Even though she’d yelled it, the remembrance touched him.
Max decided to let the dogs sleep in the car. She put their bedding on the floor of the hatch but left the hatch open just in case they needed to get out for whatever reason, and also because they were her first line of defense. She stroked each dog in parting. “Keep an eye on things out here, okay?”
They settled in and she went back into the house.
Upstairs in her bedroom, Max looked around at the white-primed walls. The room would be purple with indigo accents once the final paint was rolled on. The adjoining bathroom’s ugly cabbage rose wallpaper had been removed and in its place was more white primer.
As she undressed for her shower she thought about Adam. She knew he hadn’t wanted her to see him so vulnerable, but the episode was not something she would ever hold over his head or joke about with someone else. The fact that the attack still haunted him spoke to how much it had affected him.
The hot shower felt good on her still healing back. Afterward, she put on her favorite Dallas Cowboys nightshirt jersey and stuck her feet back into her boots. Grabbing a few items, she went down the hall to check out Kaitlin’s room. There was too much at stake not to take a good look around.
Just like Adam said, there was an elaborately scrolled wooden K on the door to Kaitlin’s room. Max tried the knob. Locked. No problem. She opened up her small packet of burglary tools and picked the lock. She assumed Benny would keep Kaitlin occupied until morning, so she had little fear of being caught. She flicked on the light switch beside her and stared around in wonder at the pink and white fairyland. The foo-foo canopied bed, the ruffles, the lace, froze Max in place. The room looked like it had been decorated by Laura Ashley on steroids. It was a marked contrast to the rest of the tumbledown house. Max wondered who’d paid for it all. Her father, possibly? She couldn’t see Adam doing it.
She had come in to take a peek at Kaitlin’s computer, which she now saw sitting on a small table covered by a cutesy pink gingham tablecloth. Wondering how anybody could be in this sugar sweet room and not go into a diabetic shock, she pulled out the white French provincial chair with its pink flowered cushion and sat down in front of the monitor.
The computer booted up with no problem. Max clicked on AOL and hoped Kaitlin was one of those lazy folks who kept their password stored on the computer. As the sign-on dialog box appeared, Max smiled. Sure enough, the password was stored. All she had to do was hit Enter, and AOL did the rest.
Because the government was paying her to be nosy, she felt not an ounce of guilt reading the young woman’s sent e-mails. Especially when she read one in particular:
Father. How are you. Well I hope. FYI. Adam has hired a housekeeper to replace Mrs. Wagner. She’s some tall ugly woman named Max Blake. She has turned the house upside down and is throwing herself at him by running around wearing nothing but a towel. This is disrupting Adam’s work so much that he is snapping at me and being mean. Can you come up and talk to him about replacing her? K
Max shook her head and said aloud, “Miss Kaitlin, I got over being called tall and ugly a long time ago.” For a moment she let herself remember the hell that had been middle school, where the boys and many of the girls called her everything from Geoffrey the Toys ‘R’ Us Giraffe to Andre the Giant.
Brushing aside the memories of those haters, she scanned all of Kaitlin’s recently sent and received mail, but none of the other messages pertained to her, nor did she see anything that might link Kaitlin to the e-mail Adam had received about his mother or the appearance of Robinski. Satisfied for now, but still no closer to any answers as to who the men threatening Adam might be, she signed off, then shut down the computer.
Max put everything back the way she’d found it, hit the light switch, locked the door, and returned to her own room. After removing her boots and turning off her own light, she climbed into the new bed and snuggled beneath the crisp, new, lilac-colored bedding. It was only ten-thirty, early for her to be turning in, but she was tired and glad to be finally sleeping in a bed again.
It took her a while to doze off, though, because Adam Gary kept floating across her mind. His parents were relatively well off financially, so she assumed he’d received some kind of counseling after the terrible attack. Having been trained in intelligence, she knew that the mind could be a tricky entity, especially in response to trauma. She just hoped
he’d find a way to see himself clear because he needed light to quell the darkness encasing him.
Jan Kruger was furious. Not only had Vlad Oskar not gone to Michigan as he’d been assigned, but he’d sent an underling in his place, an underling who’d not been properly screened and apparently could no longer be found. According to the heavily sweating Oskar, it had been six hours since he last made contact, and repeated attempts to rouse the agent via his mobile phone had been unsuccessful. “So where do you think he is?” Jan asked, turning cold blue eyes on the short, brown-eyed Oskar staring back at him from the monitor on his laptop. Jan was in a hotel suite in Chicago, and Oskar was in his car in Miami.
“I don’t know,” Oskar said tightly.
“Did he arrive?”
“Yes. I spoke with him as he drove up to the house’s gate. After that, nothing.”
“You were supposed to go personally.”
“I know,” he said, and took a moment to wipe at the moisture gathering above his thin upper lip. “But the woman selling the plane components we need said I had to do the deal today or she’d sell to another customer. I had no choice but to send someone to Michigan in my place.”
Jan didn’t respond. He knew the components were necessary for reprogramming the computers in the planes he’d purchased in Copenhagen. Finding someone on the black market who dealt in quality merchandise like the female dealer in Miami had not been easy. However, the understanding didn’t diminish the danger they all might be facing if Oskar’s man was in the hands of the police. “Keep trying to contact him, and stay in touch.”
“I will,” Oskar promised, then quickly signed off.
Jan stared distastefully at the blank monitor screen. Oskar might have been telling the truth about the components, but Jan was convinced he hadn’t gone to Michigan because he’d been afraid. Oskar had been recruited and brought on board by one of the old Afrikaners, named Rand, whose money was helping to finance the operation. Jan had had misgivings from the very beginning about Oskar’s suitability, but kept his mouth shut because technically Rand and his wealthy fellows, all of whom had been prominent members of the Nationalist Party before the collapse of the old ways, were in charge. As a result, they were at their homes in Durban and outside of Pretoria while he was here cleaning up Oskar’s mess.